Gentoo Archives: gentoo-ppc-dev

From: David Chamberlain <daybird@g.o>
To: gentoo-core@g.o
Cc: gentooppc-dev@g.o
Subject: [gentooppc-dev] Re: [gentoo-core] ARCH=ppc in unified portage and some downfalls
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2002 17:25:04
Message-Id: 3D05AA1C.709@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentooppc-dev] ARCH=ppc in unified portage and some downfalls by Mark Guertin
1 Hi Mark,
2
3 I'm in full agreement with you that work is needed on ports stability.
4 I think, however, that I have a slightly different perspective. First,
5 I think that it is amazing and groundbreaking that gentoo can have two
6 different architectures running, if not perfectly, then at least very
7 well indeed from a single package tree. As you know, the ppc port is
8 still really in its infancy, and it's a testament to the power of
9 Portage that it works as well as it does already. I think we need to
10 decide what our priority is: is it to have a stable ppc distro asap, or
11 is it to do something new and exciting, and still get a stable distro
12 after just a little while longer - one that will be a model for linux
13 distributions for some time to come? To put it another way, to opt for
14 separate trees would be to sacrifice exactly what is so special about
15 gentoo-ppc: it's not a separate distro from gentoo-x86, it just _is_
16 Gentoo, and for me that's about as cool as it gets.
17
18 Another point: I've been using gentoo-x86 for quite a while now, and it
19 has its own share of QA problems (and this is its acknowledged #1
20 priority now). For now, it's just the gentoo way to have a few things
21 broken. I'm not saying it should stay that way, but if gentoo-ppc
22 "looks bad" because of broken stuff, that's not unique to gentoo-ppc :-)
23
24 Well, none of this invalidates your complaints - I just want to draw
25 attention to the importance of priorities. As for actual fixes, I'm all
26 for the improved masking schemes. I suggest, too, that we (ppc-devs)
27 make it our business to stay up to date on exactly what gets changed in
28 portage from this point of view, and to disseminate clear info to all
29 other gentoo devs so they know what needs to be done. Some important
30 recent changes (slots, licenses...) have appeared without much
31 documentation about usage, and that makes devs wary of using them. We
32 don't want this to be the case with changes that affect the ports.
33
34 Another idea (you and I discussed this one on irc the other day): since
35 repoman and lintool are being made pretty much necessary for committing
36 ebuilds, how about adding functionality to them to flag arch-dependent
37 issues (e.g. if a patch is added to source, have lintool ask "is your
38 patch arch-independent?").
39
40 David